Kristy Bowen: December 2025

At the edge of the field, we see the angriest bodies.

The spell is in the wrists, the shampoo— girls with long throats and a penchant for divining rods. In the end, the house burns beneath the moon opening like a mouth torn out of a book. All our rooms have wants, our wants— broken doors. We smolder beneath dresses, our buttons, our brocade dark. Even now, the mice shred newspapers in attics filled with cages ripped from hooks in parlor walls, in parlors ripped from a woman's skin, all eyelets and hooks.

At the edge of the field, we watch with matches in our skirts.

© Kristy Bowen 2006

re-published from Caffeine Destiny

Kristy Bowen: September 2025

Arielle, whose name means lion of god, says to write messy poems. You know you’re there when the poem really makes you worry. I worry over car wrecks and falling in the shower. Crying on buses and wearing bad shoes. I try to write a poem I wouldn’t want to sleep with. Would kick to the curb, wrap my thumbs around her slender neck and snap. This one’s still babied, blinking, wondering if it wants to be a skirt or a tire iron. Licking the perimeter of opened envelopes for a tiny bit of sweet.

My nouns go awry every time I stop paying attention. Fall pretty like dimes on the sidewalk. My friend Melissa, whose name means bee-like, has a theory about systems. For every change in variable, the outcome shifts toward constant decay.

On Thursday, I wear a red ribbon around my throat and am capable of the most serious damage. Wash my hair with beer and make paperclip chains, while he fucks someone else. A Katherine, whose name means torture. Who hangs out in wine bars and yoga studios and calls at 3am. Her syllables click like a bicycle tire, a pack of cards.

© Kristy Bowen 2007

re-published from Dusie

From P.F.S. Post (2025)

for Mary Walker Graham

I.
“We’re at our most bestial when threatened not
with hatred but indifference; what our blood wants
is reaction of some kind.” New Hampshire night,
our own reaction, you pliant, penetrable, laid out beneath me as
flies fidgeted our room, pirouetted moist air. Yet
we sank beneath bestiality to do just what indifferently
we wanted, beneath our glut of blood, so the summoned
beasts might react with this: ripped limb from limb,
buried in low-lying Virginia swamp marsh, given what
aphorism is only got in extinction, darling, as I quote
what you said at the bar before. In other words, they
hated us. The one-night stand wouldn’t matter if your
brain didn’t have the right words in it: stories, sequences,
slammed-down metaphors of a singed self. Frequencies.

II.
As the world between her legs tightened around
her, what she saw in bed with me was stark: okra,
stamens, roots, all that in nature coalesces in erect
growth; and a shadow father bent, then erect, then
bent again, perverse from amassing wealth in a world
whose submissiveness poisons him. Beneath the sultry,
wooded surface, what I saw was a semi-frightened
animal, along for an all-night ride (gruesomeness of
4 a.m. New Hampshire sun), knife thusly thrusting
into the backs of everyone around her, managing
to have stamina enough against constraint to take
what she was taking. The mattress thumped: above,
an angel was unable to conceal laughter, understanding
it was all in the script, including the garish sun’s leer.

Frequencies II re-published from Otoliths 50

From Ink Pantry (2025)

Each day, I’m hollowed by
the Recession’s vacuum, & either
create my life or perish— no sense
of safety or coherence from a storied
past. As I walk Conshohocken’s
streets, I note the sky, just before
dawn, amusing itself in pastels—
ice on branches over tiny front/
back yards— all held self-sufficiently
in time’s objective indifference,
which I now feel passionately about,
for & against, December’s circuits—

Rosanna Lee: May 2025

The Cyclone rattled its last rat a tat tat
roller-coaster shudder two decades ago.
The skeleton still stands as testament to a bygone
New York Jewish era.
The construction crane demolished 
the last, wiry matchstick remains,
because at night, it swayed and made
a sing song noise that made them
think it would crash one night and kill someone,
last ligaments brushed away.

Today no one goes to see the freak show. The bearded lady
and somnambulist have shaved and awoken.
The Siamese twins are severed and killed.
Cut the baby in half and the real parent will speak up.
The Wisdom of Solomon is the new freak show.
It's the real parents screaming cut them, kill one, and leave
me a normal baby for chistsakes!

Even the circus died. No one's amazed anymore.
The Norwegian trapeze artists and gypsies keep
up the desperate legacy of their sad parents.
The ringmaster parodies himself in mocking bravado.
The elephants stink and are crusty and march in unending circles
with glamorous, glittering ladies who do not seem to exist
even though they're straddling beasts.
Professor Sascha talks to the animals with a long whip, magic,
& the white horses leaping really are so ravishing, tame and wild.
The big tent droops; the crystal ball dulls to wood.

One night a child goes to the circus carnival for the last time.
He fingers the illusion and all the players congeal into waxy ice:
Feather Woman in mid-flip above the net, tiger tamer with his head
in the mad kitty's jaws, the clown mid-tumble with his
shiny shoes on the dusty ground.

© Rosanna Lee 2008

Chris McCabe: May 2025

Debating the relative merits of Orchestral Manoeuvres in The Dark
or Tears for Fears, while April ice melts slowly in Westmount Park.

Now appears to be less world-shaking than when, Misha G., we both
could be smartly vehement about Richard Rorty, Boy George, Truth,

Logic & being spanked by Marianopolis twins known to us as Ruth.
Not that we were L. Cohen’s heirs, but rather a pair of young pioneers

gazing into the future with our smoking jackets for uniforms, sayers
of sooth but more often faux-decadent imbibers of lascivious perfumes,

who often drank tea (before it was Pennyroyal) on mornings as Winter
Dripped away as surely as Youth does— as children, crushed on looms.

If such industrial imagery seems a tad stark, consider the Reagan Years
were also ours in Montreal. We danced: slim Japanese New Wavers,

The Cure & The Smiths our aural neighbours if not allies; felt Time’s
Axis turn, as early eloquence (our praxis) dried up in Age’s Summer.

© Chris McCabe (?)

Jeanine Campbell: June 2025

I’m a girl in a box, yup, that’s me, here I sit seven hours a day, five days week in a chemical fog, peering out of the windows of my glass box, my 12-by-12 crystal cage, a caged girl with a painted porcelain face contorted in a Revlon death mask I sculpt daily from cosmetics I shoplifted from Rite-Aid, under my cleopatra sex goddess wig that glints glossy and unreal under the neon lights where I turn and burn into crystal, into a glass mummy who rots the minutes and hours away in the girlie zoo, wrapped in swaddling lacy underthings, moon drunk from the bee-stings that cover my arms, sometimes nodding but mostly awake staring at myself with mascara eyes that smolder in the mirror and day-dreaming under the glare of the red bulb that illuminates my cell, imprisoned by the 24-hour stare of the crimson sun that never sets and follows each orgasm I fake, a sun that mocks me as I pose in the window where I watch each anonymous man tread the wax floors munching on candy bars or smoking cigarettes as they gawk, all of us good girl animals of Al’s Triple XXX theater who smirk and tap on the windows with fat knuckles begging choose me! choose me! Not me. I wait, the queen bee with my dope-sick patience, well-trained, house broken, my mirror me watching, freezing into a wicked wicked witch baby, a white-trash ice-queen, eyeing Dee-dee, the fake redhead cokehead in the booth across from me with basilick eyes as she strikes her syphilitic supermodel pose from better and younger days, beckoning with her yen sigh and spacey eyes, her rolls of fat becoming lazy, voluptuous as she wraps her boa around herself taut like a telephone wire, communicating something nobody will ever hear.

SLAM! the metal door bangs shut on the other side of my box, Italian shoes scuffling on the floor of my crypt, knocking on the window. He chose me. I hear him cursing, fiddling in frustration with the money box in the darkened chamber, shoving a deuce up the slot of the little black box on the other side of the confessional, this little black electronic box that bleeps SESSION and devours the dollars of the hard-working American men, the harvest of truckers and mobsters and lawyers, swallows up all the capitalist secrets and lies of the young white punks, the middle-aged black guys with their SSI checks, the ancient Asian men who tremble when they cum, the cool-ass, cracked Latino men, and your occasional slobbering drunken yuppie couple, in one greedy, democratic gulp, because this is America, dammit, and we’re all free to exploit ourselves as long as we don’t step on somebody else’s turf, but the shutter is sliding up and so much for politics because there he is, standing there, middle-aged causcoid knight with thinning hair, big nose and pervert glasses that hide his x-ray eyes that burn through the glass wall that separates us, his hands stuffed in a green L.L. Bean jacket that his wife probably got him last christmas, trying to smile but obviously scared shitless of me, the whore, flicking my smoke and dropping dirty glitter on the palace floor and believe it or not I’m actually feeling a little sorry for this poor schmuck, this burn-out insurance salesman type who stands there looking a little dumb and a little fat at me, his slum queen, slumming it up at Al’s on this beautiful sunny afternoon.

© Jeanine Campbell 1998

re-published from Siren's Silence

Jen Tynes: July 2025

I feel like a mother when I wear
someone else's shoes, tie someone else's
laces into rabbits' feet in darkness
on the front stairs at dawn, wait
for the mailman to come & rub
my heels together til we're home. I feel
like a mother talking loudly around
young boys & their fragrant tufts
of armpit hair on the subway, & I rev my
engine on the highway, & when I’m not behind
the wheel making horn noises with my
nose & mouth, I feel like a mother
who has forgotten how to breathe water,
insisting that everyone ought to be breathing
air by now. I feel like my mother
is dead although it hasn't happened
yet that I feel like a motherless child. I
feel like a mother when I make a list of names
that calls all my enemies out & I post the list
on a grocery store bulletin board (T's
all crossed as ugly moustaches), I feel like a mother
when I shave my beard and all my children tiptoe
around the kitchen sink giggling
& swinging from their blades,
when I am offered glasses of wine
without pieces of bread
soaking in them, when I transmit my own
signals from antennas, from a jar
in the earth to a cage full of animals
in the living room. I feel like
cooking those books for you, but that
isn't love, that’s history.

© Jen Tynes 2008

re-published from No Tell Motel

From Talking About Strawberries (2025)

Artfully arranged arrows engorge hidden quivers
she carries, everywhere she goes. Each day registers
as a clarion call to the hunt. Javelins are squirreled
away for special hunt days. The self-generated mystique
of the girl warrior magus makes others nervous.
What makes it onto canvas— Spanish-colored visions
of child-like dilapidation, children blankly born into
the special dwarf dodo dance the human race does— takes,
transcendentalizes violence into a vision quest for the most
morose human truth, tripping eyes into realizations of
deep, absurd diminutions. This is a woman unused to
conventions, around that word (love) which cannot appear
in her paintings, themselves sharp like javelins. Her eyes
cannot be anything but green, but her carnivore streak is pure earth.

I cannot deign to speak of where, how, why she was raised,
except to say that what was needy in her crystallized as
her most precious asset. The child in her cannot die.
That the special circumstance is not a coincidence—
the analogous morose days I spent in Bethesda in my
own childhood, dragged unwillingly by those I
had no idea were adversaries into a matrix, corrupt
in its tininess, lying in all directions to cover up
stunted, blunt motives— can remain in the grave
where it belongs. It’s all too sad. But transmuting
sadness into anger, anger into representational panache,
is what this Diana does best. She, too, would look
ravishing at the center of the Great Stair Hall.
And could laugh, here and there, at the whole thing. Between shots.

Mary Walker Graham: April 2025

Or, it could go like this, since
you want to know names,
places, people, particulars:

it was the particular paradise
of ninety acres of orchard grass
and a few scattered woods;
barbed wire, Holsteins,
and the plush of spring
as you feel it, wet beneath you,
when you sit down in a field in May—

or in the pasture’s folds where the creek ran:
there were ores of a grey clay
she could sit and mine all morning;
rotting trees, whose meat flaked off
like the flesh of fish;
or in the barn where the straw-dust
harried and swirled.

It was in an inheritance,
since it was given as all earth is given,
as ready to receive the pledge
of a young girl as the cow-flops
and the dull thud of horses’ hooves.

We may start here in this field,
with her kneeling, with the colors wet and black
suddenly pouring up—
but eventually we will have to confront the father,
then the ravishment by air,
then, still later—
the ravishment by imagination.

© Mary Walker Graham 2005

re-published from Poetry

Mary Walker Graham: October 2025

When I found my voice, it was so quiet
no one listened. No one. That was my best love.

And when I came up from the river muck
I found my face; that was like smiling.

The snake does not care, nor the white egret—
and whole flocks of geese, white and Canadian,

settle on the boat landing. Rubbish.
Rubbish and weeds. It was not so quiet

when I screamed; with my face in the water,
not a whisper. Drowned or owned,

I’m now here. My face breaks with a bit of blue—
a bit of bruise and some rawness in the rushes.

© Mary Walker Graham 2005

re-published from Poetry

Tammy Armstrong: August 2025

We needed a memory
for a meal no one could finish.
Hooked index fingers into bowls of black—
cursive graffiti
along the dining room table.

Not contained on sponge pads,
cover charge bar stamps
the ink pooled cabaret make-up.
Not all offerings from the ocean are grand.

Squid like a boxed ear
swollen, cut
re-shaped into a gift,
an adjustable ring from a small town carnival
from a lover who doesn’t know me well.
I’d marry if asked.

But these rings bloat the rice indigo
marring late night calligraphy
when we can’t see how
we’ve outstayed another welcome.

© Tammy Armstrong 2006

published in P.F.S. Post 2006-2025

Tammy Armstrong: July 2025

We dressed too early for the funeral:
at the card table, third pot of coffee
killing time
with button talk,
how stitches never match eyelets
and you as small boy
taught in French how to repair a torn knee . . .

thick fingered, you thread a needle
tighten each button on the suit jacket
tailored in Thailand
asking if the weave
is worn too shiny
from months in your backpack.

Hours from now I’ll gather the suit
from the kitchen tiles—
stripped as though in flames.
I’ll smooth the shoulder pads
to the wooden hanger,
align the buttons
while you stand, near naked,
in the living room,
Standard Muffler sign
our only light.

© Tammy Armstrong 2006

published in P.F.S. Post 2006-2025

Tammy Armstrong: June 2025

Near the return and exchange desk
the sink drain blare of Cash 11, Manager to Cash 11,
bulb-split amraryllises,
petals halogen rusted, garden bulimic,
stand sturdy in clay cups
while the mats at the automatic door grow streamy
with boot tracked snow, slush.

Ski coats shift sibilation,
each down-plump body
maneuvering the card table,
careful not to catch a leaf
above sparkle-glue bijouteries,
outsized flanges, piano hinges.

Amaryllis—
dismissed amid vulcanized rubber
boxing day sale perfume—
an ostentatious widow
price shops at the discount tire.

© Tammy Armstrong 2006

re-published from Eyewear

Tammy Armstrong: May 2025

This begins my affair:
this new face in our bed.

Fastidiousness spatchcocked
into shiftless lust
in a basement tavern
where base boys
dance with undergrads.
We drink with blind date enthusiasm.

Treat me proverbial,
chalky with wine & newness,
bringing it all to bed
while he’s away on a road trip.

This perennial hook-up
leaves alarm clocks,
toothbrush rituals in the margins.
Back story:
a much younger you,
a .12 gauge, a chipmunk.
The words don’t matter at last call.

Take me home in the van—
a box of finishing nails
chattering
in the back,
a weeks worth of Globes & Mails
nested on the passenger seat.

If they ask, tell them—
yes, we left the Chevron
near the Tannery
around three—
a new pack of smokes
paid for from an ambitious wallet.
Clearly, single before tonight.

© Tammy Armstrong 2006

published in P.F.S. Post 2006-2025

Brandi Homan: December 2025

He holds on to life with his teeth,
dangles it by the nape.
Tastes with the fury of cayenne,
says hush-hush-hush
with his hands as he drinks
wine from me like an open spoon.
He can tell magenta from maroon.
He grins like the devil,
all jump-start & red bell
pepper. Stitches me together
as if my cunt is a wound,
his tongue, copacetic.
I mend, sprout wings,
scream things.
A firebird possessed
of the power to fly,
he shuts his eyes,
wills it so.
Off he goes.
Grunt & scruff, this
spitfire, hellcat—
a scrapper who turns the screws
of my truss rod, straightens
my back. Names the stars
of my knees with one eye
closed, opens my gates,
faces the bull.
Olé! He’s muy caliente.
Itch, bitch, & boil,
he celebrates supine
& sublime. Pins
the tail on the donkey
every time, this toreador.
A necromantic lynx who
swallows whole but plays
legato, in tune.
He follows me out of rooms.
Hush-hush-hush.
It will be all right.
He who holds on to life with his teeth
will never go hungry.
Faster, pussycat.
Kill! Kill!

© Brandi Homan 2006

re-published from Seven Corners Poetry (7C)

Kristy Bowen: August 2025

I am all butter cream and lace when
we abandon this house for another
with a picket fence and a tiny door.
Clandestine, destined
to have too many holes we can’t fill.
Despite the flurry of hands, we are drowsy,
playing cards and fucking in the afternoon.
Holding our nostalgia like a cake knife.

Soon, we abandon this car for another
with a blue lush interior that smells like Winstons.
I make a flip book out of our indiscretions’
misspellings. Finger the upholstery
while we play roulette with beer bottles.
Kiss me, kiss me not.
My hope all parade floats and dancing bears
until I split the infinitives,
spill the milk, slit the window screens.
Go for the jugular.

My sleep is still white, all paper and milk.
Counting the cracks in the ceiling,
dividing three and three and three.
Outside the amaryllis is ridiculous,
lewdly red and unruly.
I am counting spiders in the eves as you leave.
One and one and one.

© Kristy Bowen 2010

re-published from diode

Kristy Bowen: August 2025

And yesterday, blue tasted like licorice.
Even the wind chimes caused dizziness;
the ache of paper lanterns rotting
from the acacias. Perhaps the L in my name
makes you sad, evokes a film where a woman waves
from a train. Or how this horizon wants to be a hymn.
If you listen, you can hear the holes in the alphabet,
the sounds lit by the lamps of our bones.
Perhaps with this page I could fashion a boat
or a very convincing window— 

a dress made entirely of vowels.

© Kristy Bowen 2005

re-published from Milk Magazine

Kristy Bowen: September 2025

Morning is a burned thing, Louise.
Spoiled like a shuttered house.

Paper everywhere— under the beds,
in the dresser, floating
the pale skin of soup.

You make a cage of your fingers
to keep out light. Chicken bones
to keep out the dead. Grey
where it’s all wearing at the ends.

Your braids still tied in a V
when the dark comes to you like a cat.
A long hallway. A girl in pink
sateen against a backdrop of stars.

Make one turn, then another.
When you shut all the latches,
shut your eyes. A little gin, Louise.

© Kristy Bowen 2006

re-published from Dusie

Kristy Bowen: October 2025

Eight o’clock and we open
our skirts, our rumpled lace.
Black gloved in the wings,

passing cigarettes and flirting
with the pianist. Night
folds me like a doll into a dress,

lusting for copper, chocolate,
whatever I can bite down
on. I am especially attuned

to wrists, the rehearsal
within the rehearsal.
Floorboard creaks and fire hazards.

The soloist offers me
a jug of wine, a catbird.
Can do a trick with flying

that puts the aerialist to
shame. Mechanics, she says,
all pulleys and wires.

Her music box plays something
that sounds like Wagner.
My hair tangles in her paper fan.

There’s a crumpled dollar
in my pocket, three gallons
of salt water in the larder.

© Kristy Bowen 2007

re-published from No Tell Motel

Kristy Bowen: December 2025

Soon, the objects nearest the house begin to crumple like bows, putting back their shapes. They sing the dead from their drawers, the white from our sheets. Soon, even the cats won’t sleep. Night, a girl falling through trees. A chair fastened to the floor. Before the wreck, I wore a checked dress and talked about poison: deux ex machina. My hair medicinal, written. Bloodstains where he looked for me on the car seat, the white sheets. He looked for me with the kitchen knife, trampling the azaleas. The devil in me swooned in the root cellar, where I tried to keep him, couldn’t feed him. He sang the town to ruins. Sewed the sky into a slit.

© Kristy Bowen 2008

re-published from No Tell Motel

Kristy Bowen: December 2025

The girls you love make beautiful suicides,
breaking off heels, losing orchid
corsages beneath backseats of Buicks.

This one speaks through the curtain
of her hair— the sweet blonde number,
soft machine of her ribs humming,

an engine block full of bees.
The dark has too much rigging. The moon,
projected on a screen with tinfoil stars,

is full of holes. Bankrupt gas stations,
the backs of women's calves.
Your flares set fire to the homecoming float,

the gym and all its paper carnations—

mouths gone metallic pink
harbor tire irons, rhinestone tiaras.

© Kristy Bowen 2007

re-published from Sharkforum

Becky Hilliker: December 2023

The wind turns the water into an animal
& the boat rides the back of swells,
bucking wetly.
My legs absorb the push & pull,
thinking only of the fish,
sleek & dripping on the line,
neon green parachute ballooning
from its mouth.

I arch my back
& the rod dives.
The fish lifts, slimy as an egg,
spinning like a ballerina
on a silver thread,
its marble eye mute,
fixed on white.

How many times 

did you find this world, 
blinded, terrified?
There are hands on you
& pliers in your mouth,
metallic, blood-washed.
How many times have you waited
for the water
while everything lurches around you,
brilliant white, like the inside
of a hospital, like the underbelly
of a dream, gasping
to break the surface
toward that cold & sudden light?

Chris McCabe: December 2024

the smell of the sea
on your skin—

as today your breasts
(can I say this) poured out

to the beach at
San Sebastian

eyes saw more than they
could hold

like Aphrodite was back
against the tide of fashion

a shell in your hand
innocently to show me

with more inside
than today can hold

Alexandra Grilikhes: December 2024

death came to me drunk
wearing a new white island outfit
she’d bought that day. The men
on the road called us cunts.
“This is my dream place,” she breathed,
“I feel so alive here. Fuck me on this
bench.” On the half-lit porch,
the watchman taking a midnight nap
around the bend, I did as I was
told for a long time thinking I’d
please death this time at last. Later
she rolled away and in the morning
rose early and left. I bought
death many presents. She bought me rags.

© Alexandra Grilikhes 1994

republished from the Insight to Riot chapbook The Reveries

Jenny Kanzler: December 2024

Orange Alert (OA): How would you describe your work?

Jenny Kanzler (JK): Symbols for anxiety, fear, loneliness and loss or metaphors for invasion, like illness, infection, and infestation -- generally, preoccupations of nightmares. Many of my paintings focus on the struggle between empathy and disgust and the relationship of the viewer to the object or conflict. They present things that did happen, altered through a faulty memory, simplified to isolate some specific occurrence, embellished, rewritten and presented as some new story connected to the original only in essence. They are narratives, employing realism and storytelling to represent an idea.

OA: You seem to have a very interesting and at times dark subject matter, where do you draw your inspiration from?

JK: The Velveteen Rabbit (William Nicholson illustrations), the Twilight Zone, David Lynch (especially the Elephant Man and Eraserhead), Bluebeard, the Brother’s Quay, Francisco Goya, Francis Bacon, Hans Holbein the Younger, Diego Velazquez, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, A Nightmare on Elm street, the Changeling, Rosemary’s Baby, the Little Girl who Lived Down the Lane, Saturday matinee movies, the playground – the girl who pretended to be a horse, the day Brian Flaherty and I threw up in the lunchroom, Aldus Huxley’s Heaven and Hell, Freud’s essay on the uncanny, my German grandmother, my beau Abe, my family and friends and the many strange and interesting things that they say, people I don’t know who sleep on the subway, the naked man at the end of the alley and all kinds of other surprising occurrences that a person might witness walking around Philadelphia at any time of day or night.

OA: I've noticed a lot of reoccurring colors in your work, do you have a set color palette? What is your intention in using these specific colors?

JK: The colors I use are burnt umber, raw sienna, raw umber, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, cerulean blue, ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, and titanium white. Generally, I underpaint in earth tones, and then as the image develops incorporate more color. Since the development of the image interests me, I try not to hide everything that’s happened. Lately, I’ve been inserting jewel tones and placing them in contrast to muddy colors, presenting a clean/dirty conflict that relates to the empathy/disgust conflict.

OA: Earlier this year you participated in a solo show entitled "Creepy Sweet". In my opinion that really describes your work, a little creepy, but sweet and nostalgic. It's familiar, but uncomfortable at the same time. What is the intended purpose of presenting these images and what are some of the reactions that you have received?

JK: When others describe the work as familiar, as you just did, or say that it reminds them of something that happened to them, and then they tell me some personal story, or if they laugh, those are the best reactions. Occasionally I completely horrify people, and then we’re all upset and disturbed. The goal of connecting with others through an investigation of the human condition is lost. I worry that I have misjudged my audience and that my insertion has a negative impact on others. There’s also an embarrassment component. It’s as if I’ve said you know how sauerkraut smells awful but it tastes so good and it’s almost as if the reason that it’s so good is that it smells so bad, it’s like it’s the contrast or something...and the other person replies no - sauerkraut is disgusting.

OA: I have noticed a lot of great work coming out of Philly lately. How would describe the current scene in Philly?

JK: To me it seems small enough to be manageable but large enough to be interesting. My recent favorites are Hiro Sakaguchi at Seraphin Gallery, and Mark Shetabi at the Tower Gallery. Longtime favorites are local heroes Edna Andrade, Thomas Chimes and Sydney Goodman. Second Thursday at the Crane building is never disappointing. The building was formerly a bathroom fixture factory, which is now converted into artists’ studios and galleries including Inliquid, Nexus, the Icebox, and Kelly Webber Fine Art (formerly 201 gallery where I had the “Creepy Sweet” show). There’s a refreshing enthusiasm in the gallery owners. They present what interests them and take chances with younger, lesser-known artists. Plus, second Thursday visitors are greeted by a generous offering of food and alcohol.

OA: What's next for Jenny Kanzler?

JK: Other than making a Halloween costume? From October 8th – November 6th, I’ll have several paintings on view in the “Window on Broad” adjacent to the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, near the northeast intersection of Broad and Pine, Center City Philadelphia. October 19th – November 9th, i cannot remember, a four-person show of sculpture, video, and drawings with fellow artists and friends: Alison Nastasi (who curated the show), Theresa Rose and Mariya Dimov at little berlin gallery, 1801 N. Howard Street, near the intersection of 2nd and Montgomery in Fishtown, Philadelphia. Opening reception: October 19th from 6:00 – 10:00 PM with a performance by MFM. February 1st – 28th. Solo show of painting, drawing and sculpture at the Elliott Center Gallery at The University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Opening reception: February 4th, 5:30 – 7:30 PM.

Alexandra Grilikhes: December 2024

you know how certain people torment you as you
walk home in the rain on a day in february
feeling desolate,
saying to yourself, she torments me and I don’t
know why. She torments me. She is one of those
people who torments me

and you walk in the darkness, it’s raining,
you’re cold and feeling not unhappy
but not happy either and
she is always under your skin,
something you can’t describe

and you know if you say one word about it
you will lose it completely, that she torments you
and you want the thing about her that torments you
to keep on hurting

© Alexandra Grilikhes 1994

republished from the Insight to Riot chapbook The Reveries

From Moss Trill (2024)

Was it through you, Abby, I managed to do
Queer Studies 101? Here’s what I saw: you
aligned yourself with bad girls, to make yourself
look formidable, lived a life of intermittent
lassitude & discipline, tawny head bent down
to study coded missives you dared not decipher,
and then the bittersweet aftermath into postures
you earned for yourself. Girls in a row, a pretense
for an artist of your magnitude. Was that all
you had inside you? I wonder, but it’s none of
my business, as the Neo-Classical portal-way
built into your brain hovers around the Earth
for a few centuries, and the paintings themselves
form a row, disciplined, formidable, coded, bittersweet—

From Ink Pantry (2024)

Maybe its because October nights on the East
Coast can still be sultry; it was still reasonably
early, 10:30; us three in our usual semi-stupefied
lethargy got a rush of energy, decided to take a walk
over to Fresh Grocer at 40th & Walnut, get some
grub, often in short supply at 4325. I got French bread,
Mary got vegetables for stir fry, for Abby too, &
as we walked home what awaited us was little
we didn’t want. We were too stoned to be self-
consciously anything, but you can bet we were
stared at, with our symmetrical features, sculpted
cheekbones, & yet West Philly had glitter all over it
because everybody hit the street simultaneously,
we walked, levitated with everyone, & everyone levitated with us—

the house party a few nights later was beyond
levitational. Every young painter in Philly crowded
into the lived-in, yellow lit kitchen to do whiskey
shots, & drove a bunch of points home about how
the city was now working together, firing off on all
cylinders at once, even as Mary abstained, as usual,
from alcohol, which took her nervous system & trashed
it. The painters were obliging about the poet’s participation,
as laughter ricocheted into the grassy backyard area,
with its rusty fence, small concrete plots, placing us
in a city space with real green in it, even as trees
began to yellow, & as the warm weather held.
When the door to Mary’s room shut an hour later,
we took the starlight in with us, painted & owned it.

There was a night before a day with no rent when I spoke softly in your ear as you slept: one day we will get married. I have never told you this. The heatwave brings out what the winter kept hid. The most extreme since 1911 when The Times at last stopped listing the heat-stifled dead. East London was putrid in trapped tanks of air & as the women joined their men marching on Trafalgar Square the open sky was a massive success, a freedom worth fighting for. Those in Liverpool walked out in sympathy & opened the kegs they had lugged for years to drink the contents on the streets. Tomorrow you might walk on as an extra in the film of Brick Lane— relocated to Turnpike — & the money you make will go into the fund for the plans we make. Reading John James in bed I am starting to believe that I am here again. You say you are hot but wrap your legs into mine, well there’s nothing the breeze from Shoeburyness — through the curtains and over the dresser — can do about that. I can’t wait for our future together you say, but when does it start? The night it happened, two weeks ago, I was no more aware of what I was going to say than would you like more wine? Ness, our time was then. The kestrel had cut its own shape against the sky like a tattoo on the retina — hovered with no wind — & as the bats, like burned swifts, tried to skirt the subject it was too late: the stars had already put us on the map. Very quietly & very secretly should we get married? Between us a glance of vitreous success that wanted to last, as if this piece of Dagenham grass would be our legacy. We waited, holding hands, for the first show of fox. Dogs barked & plotted out the silent tracks she made. Imagined fox gave way to fox — swift on the outhouse, feral, musically-ribbed — all was perfect this as she passed. Mongrel Max clambered his trampoline & scared her off. Midnight we found the doors but the walls were too thick — accustomed as we were to the poise of night our home seemed docile, an oafish fist of brick. We went to bed & the rest is this: a cost of one hundred pounds, a catalogue dress at two pounds sixty for 52 weeks. Last night I dreamt us a thumbnail baby with no rollover link but as we looked close we were so pleased with the breaths that it took. Ness, I think we are starting now. Don’t tell anyone until the Summer’s gone.

From The Seattle Star (2024)

I knew the Manhattan you grew up in well indeed—
the Upper West Side— gruesomely built of blocks
of primitive brick & stone. But, for you, with two
orchestra musician parents, a ticket into New York
Bohemia, bagels & lox from Zabar’s, then nothing,
popcorn, then back to Zabar’s. Whether feast or
famine, no forced schooling for you, just days at
home with paints and canvases, from a young
age, for company, hours of repetition, breakthroughs.
Always unease, that what you wanted to paint
was too formal, too advanced, for the land
of Warhol & Koons. You were ready for Philly.
PAFA, drugs, dykes, all in preparation for
finding it, your mind’s precious Rosetta Stone.

Your vision grew limpid as your life went crazy—
ensconced in the Center City beau monde,
directing traffic, wedded to an Irish witch
who wished you the worst in the end, every
distillation of visual perfection in your brain
found refulgent form, as you found time to
fall into my arms as well, & I rode analogous waves—
why it was all lost then was simple— the girls,
your girls, didn’t like it. They were threatened
by a genius they knew to be easily trounced.
I never let you go. I still won’t: the halcyon
nights we spent remain the guiding light of
my life, in this world & beyond, you & Mary,
& bruises or afterthoughts be damned, Rosetta Stoned—

Mary Walker Graham: June 2024

When I say pit, I’m thinking of a peach’s. As in James and the Giant, as in: the night has many things for a girl to imagine. The way the flesh of the peach can never be extricated, but clings— the fingers follow the juice. The tongue proceeds along the groove. Dark peach: become a night cavern— an ocean’s inside us— a balloon for traveling over. When I said galleons of strong arms without heads, I meant natives, ancient. I meant it takes me a long time to get past the hands of men; I can barely get to their elbows. How a twin bed can become an anchor. How a balloon floating up the stairwell can become a person. Across the sea of the hallway then, I floated. I hung to the fluorescent fixtures in the bathroom, I saw a decapitated head on the toilet. I’ll do anything to keep from going in there. I only find the magazines under the mattress, the Vaseline in the headboard cabinet. A thought so hot you can’t touch it. A pit. A broken jaw. A fever. 

© Mary Walker Graham 2007

Steve Halle: April 2024

the blue-black lake slick with oil, and rainbowed
by gasoline, burps up a carp for a fisherman
under the façade of the old power plant.

at first the fish flops and fights, hanging from the line.
the fisherman heaves the carp up and leaves
it on concrete breakwall. a sign says carp are rough fish.

the carp stops moving his mouth.

his brown scales rust dull red; his false eye mirrors
the glassy calm of the blue-black lake
slick with oil, and rainbowed by gasoline.

Chris McCabe: April 2024

Five fingered bars strobe white prisms from brick
Inversion of God’s Ministry. Bouncers are ministers,
frisk you in a soul-search. Find an in-pocket novel,
original Penguin Classic. Consider refusing you entry,
presumes you’re no trouble. Drunken bookish one.
You put your soul in the cloakroom, the ticket says 72.
There are only seven other people you can see.
They are so young your face reflects in their eyelids.
The only offer at the bar is being served.
The lager scrapes the outside of the barrel.
The dancefloor is a pelt of purple, un-refuseable.
It is so long since you last danced the baton of the rhythm
remains two seconds ahead of you. Someone faceless
suggests you are not a student; you think quick, say you have
more letters after your name than in it. The dancefloor has
doubled in size. The DJ tells you he has lent all of his albums
to a friend. You have no friends; you think he blames you
for the dancefloor being empty. Your spit is mote-dust.
The pulse in your temples is the after-audio of a chant
of a ritual. You start to dream in pink wafers. You take
your coat, it refuses to talk back. Outside is cold. The
club is called Secrets. You have never heard of the place.

Rain silvers the slate roofs, smoke blows through the rain.
The hawthorn hedges are a red haze.
The hills above the town are blurred by mist.
Beauty is stripped away.
Light is pierced with nostalgia, slow and lax.
Decadent season.
Water forms as a haze between light and rain.
Flowers and leaves decaying in the streams
Mix earth and water in slow dispersal.
Blur steals over visible forms,
Smoke and moulder stir in the ash of light.
The pools are sorrowful, the sips of flowers split.
I find a single apple whole after all these weeks,
Skin whole and pulp firm as sapwood.

In a slush of softness and excrescence,
Late berries languish on the tendrils,
Lush to dissolution, spoilt with juice,
Blacker than nature with a white tinge like regret.
In the shadow of the sunny fronds,
Where the dew never dries, they drink and rot.
Rain on the leaf, dew on the bine. Mites
Finger the abacus of their flesh.
Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.

Season of memory and regret.
Barrels coop up the giddy hearts for recollection.
The animals grow lazier and furrier:
Search out shelter and apathy!
The heady noon is gone, the soft inner of the blossoms
And their offer. The rarer veins are frozen in their course.
We waited for the glance of the sun.
The osier of bare birch twigs seems like smoke
Against the red glow of the Apple going down.

Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.
A swirl of leaves like heavy fire
Pours through the tamping of a world on the wane.
The darkened sky withholds the weary forms.
Crepuscle, dissolution of concepts;
Season of case-hardening ash,
Season of ferment and thorough steeping.
Fruits infringe their brinks and streams their brims
Overlapping the thick pulp of fallen things.

The principle of ice shall come to judgment
On the lusts of Nature, searching out the flaw.
Bare branches detach pure metre from an obese rhetoric.
Blue glare shall stake out the torpid mist,
Pure-axile crystals shall affirm the morass.

Mary Walker Graham: March 2024

Here is a box of fish marked tragedy.
Is it different from the dream

in which your alter ego kills the girl?
You are the same, and everyone knows it,

whether tracing the delicate lip of the oyster shell,
or sharpening your blade in the train car.

The marvelous glint is the same.
Though you think you sleep, you wake

and walk into the hospital, fingering
each instrument, opening each case with care.

The scales fall away with a scraping motion.
You are the surgeon and you are the girl.

Whether you lie like feathers on the pavement,
or coolly pocket your equipment, and walk away…

You are the same; and you are the same.
You only sleep to enter the luminous cave.

From Argotist Online Poetry (2024)

The vista which then opened was one I never
could’ve anticipated in the Nineties— the PAFA
campus was set as a series of jeweled buildings
smack in the center of Center City Philadelphia,
a few blocks from City Hall. Mary was then still
in enough good standing to maintain her own
studio on campus. I had to sign in as a guest on
the ground floor every time I visited. The room
was a large rectangle, & the elongated back wall
was one big window, looking out on the western
progression of Cherry Street, towards Broad. Until
Mary & Abby, I had no fixed notions of painting;
now, I dived in with the frisson of one let loose in
a wonderland. Everything about Mary was magic

to me, & the canvases arrayed around the studio,
largely male nudes, recumbent or not, plugged into
Mary’s fascination with classical mythology, & made
a case for Mary as a Don Juana, a seducer of men.
Heady stuff, & often Mary’s tales were about men
who had posed for her. Vertiginous, but I was on
the verge, nonetheless, of a full-on love affair, maybe
marriage, to a women powerful enough to be called
a Creatrix, a female goddess in the world, & I knew
it. Sleeping with Mary meant something it never could
with others; rather than a mere palliative, if you could
get her to put out in the studio, you were plugging into
a mythological web, glistening & intricate, stitching
yourself, possibly, into history, & the come was in color—

Vlad Pogorelov: March 2024

“I’ve been around the places”
So my friend says
While we are drinking wine and smoking dope
We’ve had a lot of hope
But we’ve lost it
Somewhere on the way
--Get away!
--Get away!
--Get away!
My friend Confusion
No premature conclusions
No disappointment with life
It’s only a lie
That you can get your soul drunk
Or high
She always stays sober
But she can get lost on the way
And it’s true

--My friend! How many poems have you read?
--None.
--My friend! How many poems have you done?
--None.
--My friend! How many lives have you lived?
--One.

Jimmy Page,
Johnny Cash,
Charles Bukowsky,
-ovsky, -osky,
And Karl Marx
All white but one
You know who?
Think!

My friend has moved from his chair
He is on the floor
Lying there, just lying there
Being mute,
Being deaf,
Asleep

Still, music is playing
Now, its “Fleetwood Mac”
And I’m back to the kitchen
Talking to another friend of mine.
The pigeon
The diseased bird
Who will die very soon
Maybe at night
Maybe tomorrow noon
Don’t know exactly when
Soon!

Am I multilingual?
Am I?
I can speak to the birds,
To the prostitutes,
Or even the cockroaches,
Though they never reply,
But the general rule
Always being applied:
--Baby! Get high!
--Mommy! Get high!
--Pigeons! Get high!
--Humans! Get high!
Maybe everything will be
more soft and more friendly
Maybe it will be

© Vlad(len) Pogorelov 1997